Saturday, April 01, 2006

The Neocon Imaginary Middle East: Again

Speaking of political frauds, the Web site Newshog has nailed Kenneth R. Timmerman for falsely alleging that Iran has bought nuclear warheads from North Korea. In fact, Jane's Defense Weekly reported that Iran bought some ancient missile from Pyongyang, and there was never any question of a warhead. Timmerman is taken seriously by the White House, Congress, and the US press but in fact has no credibility as an Iran expert (at IC we like our Iran experts to know Persian, the way you'd expect an expert on France to know French; we're funny that way). Even the usually canny Jon Stewart gave Timmerman a respectful hearing.

French philosopher Michel Foucault defined "representation" as a process whereby a culture creates a stereotype of something and then substitutes the stereotype for the reality forever after. Once a "representation" is established, the reality can never challenge it, since any further information is filtered through the represenation. The "representation" of Iran as a nuclear power, when it just has a couple hundred centrifuges (you need thousands) and is not proven even to have a weapons program, is becoming powerful and unchallengeable in the US media... http://tinyurl.com/f8ffv
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